In this episode I sit down with Kathleen Culhane of The Culhane Brewing Company to discuss how she came to open her first, and now her second taproom right here in Saint Paul.

I love beer, I love music, and I love touching, smelling, and experiencing history. Kathleen and I met through a mutual friend and classmate, and as a podcaster who enjoys profiling the local transgender community, I was extremely interested in having her on the show, and just as cool, well for me at least, was she said we could chat in her unfinished taproom-which is a former concert venue…It used to be Ryans, and The Lab, and Station 4…but for the last few years it was just empty.

Kathleen had suggested we meet outside, as the renovations on the building meant that she currently didn’t have a front door, and that we would have to “wind through a labyrinth” to get to the tap room. Labyrinth was an apt description, once through the front door we quickly turned to go down a flight of steps, and as we did so, modernity began to quickly leave. My favorite part of the basement was the old unused and unrepaired boiler in the corner, which had for some reason that had long ago vanished from memory, an old dusty typewriter perched on it. The typewriter seemed both out of place, but at the same time, it was somehow exactly where it should be, just like the new owner.

The majority of craft brewers in Minnesota are middle age white cisgender heterosexual men with bushy beards or, at the very least, fanciful mustaches. Like finding an old typewriter on top of a boiler, Kathleen is not what you expect to come across when visiting the many St. Paul craft breweries, and as she states in the interview, she is aware of how few women there are in the craft brew industry, but just like that typewriter, she has had years of experience in standing out.